George Martin: Down These Strange Streets

“Katamori?” she said.

“Lots of people have been through,” Katamori answered.

From this laconic response, Dahlia understood that he’d found nothing tangible on his side of the room, but that there were complex scent trails. That made sense. The north side of the kitchen was the natural route to take to get to the door on the far end of the long room. This door led into a mudroom with hooks for wet weather gear and gardening clothes. On the other side of the mudroom, a heavier door opened out onto the broad apron marking the end of the service driveway. All the humans who’d come to the mansion to donate earlier in the evening had both entered and left the mansion through that door.

“Please stay where you are for the moment,” Dahlia said to the half-demon, who bobbed her head in a series of sharp nods. Since the blood pool and the body took up the whole of the floor between the appliances and the table, Dahlia bent her knees and leaped over the table, landing lightly on her amazing heels on the other side.

She met Katamori at the end of the table, and together they looked back at the body. There was a series of bloody footprints leading away from the corpse, footprints too large to be those of the half-demon girl. These prints led to the first exit door, the door to the mudroom. Together, they examined it. There were no bloody fingerprints on the knob or the glass panes. Dahlia bent over to sniff the knob, then shrugged. “A bloody hand touched it, but that tells us nothing,” she said, and pushed the door open. Katamori tensed, ready for anything.

The mudroom was empty.

The two vampires stepped into the small space. The floor was covered with a rubber mat, and there was a bench running along each side. Underneath were stored a few pairs of boots, some of which had been there for forty years. A coat or two hung from the row of hooks mounted above the benches. At least one of the coats had been there for two decades, an elaborate black coat with a huge fur collar. “I don’t think anyone will return to get this one,” Katamori said, and pushed it with his finger. A cloud of dust rose up. Dahlia noticed that most of the hooks were similarly covered in dust. Only two of the hooks were shiny enough to indicate they’d been used recently.

The knob of the solid door that led to the outside was pristine to the eye, and when Dahlia bent to smell she got only a whiff of blood, a slightly weaker trace than that on the inner knob. “Left this way,” she told Katamori. “Let’s finish the kitchen, then we’ll report.”

They turned back into the kitchen.

Before they’d left, the humans had piled their plates and cups by the sink. Fainting humans were bad for business, so the agency had insisted the vampires take a tip from the blood bank in offering refreshments. Nothing to be found there; the victim hadn’t approached that area.

“What do we have so far?” Katamori asked.

“There’s a vampire smell in here, very recent,” Dahlia said.

“Besides the half-demon, I’m getting humans, a werewolf, at least two vampires.”

Werewolves. Dahlia’s mouth twitched. But first of all, she had to interrogate the only living creature in the cavernous room. “Demon girl,” she said, “explain yourself.” Now that Dahlia spared a moment to take in the half-demon’s ensemble, Dahlia’s eyes widened. The skinny creature, whose short hair was dyed a brilliant lime green, was wearing black Under Armour from top to bottom. Her red sneakers were a fine clash with the lilac miniskirt and a buckskin vest lined with fleece.

“I’m Diantha,” the girl said. And then she began a long sentence that was possibly in English.

“Stop,” Katamori said. “Or I’ll have to kill you.”

Diantha stopped in midword, her mouth open. Dahlia could see how very sharp the half-demon’s teeth were, and how many of them seemed to be crammed into her little mouth. Katamori would have quite a fight on his hands, and Dahlia found herself hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

“Diantha, I’m Dahlia. Our names are similar, aren’t they?” Dahlia said. She hadn’t tried to sound soothing in a century or two, and it sat awkwardly on her. “You must speak so that we can understand you. Maybe it will help you to be calm if we tell you we know you didn’t do this thing.”

“We do?” Katamori knew the reason, but he wanted Dahlia to spell it out.

“No blood on her, except on her shoes.” She didn’t bother to lower her voice. Diantha’s bright eyes were on her so intently that she knew the girl could read her lips.

“I’mtherunnerformyuncleinLouisiana,” Diantha said. She didn’t seem to need to breathe when she spoke, but at least this time she spoke slowly enough—at less than warp speed—that the vampires could understand her.

“And you are here at the ascension party because . . . ?”

“Rhodesdemonswereinvited, Iwasstayingthenightafterbringing—” And the rest of her sentence ran together in a hopeless tangle.

“Slower,” Dahlia said, making sure she sounded like she meant it.

Diantha sighed noisily, looking as exasperated as the teenager she appeared to be. “Since I was here for the night, they invited me to come with them.” She put an almost visible space between each word. “Nothing else to do, so I came with.”

“You’re visiting from Louisiana on a business errand, and you came to the mansion with the Rhodes demons because they were invited.”

Diantha nodded, her green spikes bobbing almost comically. If Dahlia hadn’t seen demons fight before, she might have laughed.

“How did you happen to enter the kitchen?” Katamori asked. During Dahlia and Diantha’s conversation, he had circled the table to stand at Diantha’s back. She had turned slightly so she could keep both vampires in view, since she was now bracketed between them. Despite Dahlia’s assurances, the half-demon girl didn’t like her situation at all. Her knees bent, and her hands fisted, ready for a challenge.

But when she spoke, her voice was steady enough. “I was going to the refrigerator,” Diantha said, still making the effort to speak slowly. “You guys were out of Sprite, and I thought it would be all right if I checked to see if there was more in the refrigerator. Ismelledtheblood—”

Dahlia held up an admonishing hand, and Diantha slowed down. “I yelled because I smelled the blood as I stepped in it.”

“Not before?” Most supernaturals had a very sharp sense of smell.

“Smell of vampire had deadened my nose,” Diantha said.

That made sense to Dahlia. Though the scent of vampire was naturally delightful to her, she had been told many times that it was overwhelming to other supernaturals.

“Was the blood still running when you came in?” The thicker trickles from spurting arteries were barely moving down the shiny surface of the appliances, and the cast-off drops that had been slung away when the throat had come out were beginning to dry at the edges.

“Little,” Diantha said.

“Was anyone else here?” Katamori said.

Diantha shook her head.

The two vampires glanced at each other, eyebrows raised in query. Dahlia couldn’t think of any more questions to ask. Evidently Katamori couldn’t, either.

“Diantha, in a second you can move.” Dahlia and Katamori closed in on each side of the body. “All right,” Dahlia said. “Step out of the blood. Take off your shoes and leave them.”

The half-demon girl followed Dahlia’s instructions to the letter. She perched on the wooden table to remove her red high-tops. She placed her stained shoes neatly side by side on the floor. “Stayorgo?” she asked, looking much more cheerful now that she wasn’t so close to the corpse. Demons didn’t often eat people, and proximity to the body hadn’t been pleasant for her.